RICK MCGINNIS AT STEYNONLINE: It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World: Russell Crowe in Master and Commander.
Fans of Peter Weir’s 2003 adventure movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World are often heard to ask, “Why didn’t they make a sequel?” as a halfway stop to the question “Why don’t they make more films like this?” The answer to the first question, like any Hollywood mystery, has to do with money and studio expectations.
The answer to the second requires you to think about men, what they like, what they want, and if any of those things have been a priority at any movie studio in the near quarter century since Master and Commander came out.
Because the audience that’s grown up around the film is palpably male, which GQ magazine thought worth exploring, in a 2023 story written by senior editor Gabriella Paiella that stated plainly: “If you kidnapped a hundred of Hollywood’s top minds and forced them to work around the clock, they could not engineer a more exquisite Dad Movie.”
It’s worth mentioning that the GQ story came out at the same time social media was briefly aflame with women asking men in their lives how often they thought about Rome. So it was time once again to hire a woman to wonder aloud just what was up with men, after all – in no less than GQ magazine. (Men’s magazines have, for years, hosted regular variations of this exercise – a regular, occasionally hostile and more than faintly condescending interrogation of its readership, their tastes and motivations that’s rarely echoed by women’s magazines.)
QED: British GQ’s condescending 2018 interview with Jordan Peterson, at the height of his superstardom. As I wrote back then:
Why would British GQ — whose name is a contraction of its original American title Gentlemen’s Quarterly serve as a platform for a radical feminist interviewer who so hates their core audience of British males? It’s the equivalent of Ebony hiring an anti-black racist or Rolling Stone hiring a reviewer who hates rock music and its fans. To Americanize what Robin Ashenden writes above at Spiked regarding the modern BBC’s disdain for Python, evidently British GQ also believes the role of the corporation is to patronize and re-educate its readers.
During Trump’s first term, Hollywood began to settle into a similar stance (see also: Kennedy, Kathleen), which answers why there are so few — if any — modern films with the tone of Master and Commander.